1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a combination of vehicles of the so called "off-road" type and attachments therefor. More particularly, this invention relates to construction equipment embodying the combination of an adaptable off-road vehicle and a variety of attachments therefor together with the method and means for readily and easily mounting and removing the attachments to facilitate cooperative working and more fully utilizing the time of the vehicle.
2. A wide variety of off-road type vehicles have been known in the prior art. Each type of vehicle has been expensive and not utilized fully, since it was ordinarily connected with a particular type of attachment. For example, graders were employed for grading roads but that were not otherwise widely useful. Similarly, front end loaders were available for scooping up the materials that the graders had scraped to a certain spot but were not used all the time. Similarly, augers, load carrying devices such as dump beds, ditch digging equipment, back-hoes, revolving jib cranes and fork lifts were all mounted on their own type vehicles. It has been particularly found desirable to have co-mounted cooperative units such as ditch digging equipment and front end loading equipment on the same vehicle.
Heretofore, however, the job of mounting and removing the respective attachments has been either prohibitively time consuming or has required auxiliary equipment and personnel. Frequently the vehicles had inferior mounts that would not take the strain. Moreover, where a plurality of mounting stations are employed, one or more of the mounting stations that were not in use would become fouled by accumulation of mud, debris and the like such that it took a prohibitively long time to clean up the mounting station or subsequence mounting of an attachment.
From the foregoing it can be seen that the prior art was not totally satisfactory in providing a combination of an off-road vehicle, attachments therefor and attachment means that facilitated readily mounting and removing the respective attachments so as to be useful.
Specifically, the prior art has been less than totally satisfactory in providing the means and method for mounting attachments onto an adaptable off-road vehicle whereby a single operator could make the mounting or the removal.